PS Tip 97: Writing a personal statement

Writing a personal statement requires patience, planning and good old-fashioned hard work. You’ll also learn a lot in the process, which is slightly unfortunate because you tend to have forgotten everything by the time you have to do it again.

The previous tips have covered in detail how to plan, write and edit your personal statement, so here I just want to provide a few thoughts on how to actually get the job done.

Firstly, I would split the planning, writing and editing processes up entirely. Once you get into a task it’s usually not too difficult to continue… but moving onto another task is an entirely different matter. If you know that in an evening you’re just going to plan your statement, that doesn’t seem too bad. And once the planning is done, writing your statement on a Saturday seems much more achievable. And editing… Well, once you’ve written the statement it’s only a matter of a few hours, split across several days, and that’s not too bad, right?

What I’m getting at is, try not to think about everything you have to do right at the beginning. As with any large job, thinking about it all at once can be rather daunting, and the temptation might be to do a rush-job.

Don’t do that.

Firstly, it will show, and secondly you simply will not do yourself justice if you try to rush the process of writing your personal statement. And that would be a real shame.

If you think about it, you’ve already done 99% of the work for your personal statement by racking up all those achievements, skills and experience; now that you’ve done all that, don’t you owe it to yourself to write it up effectively?